Uber Advertises for Manager in Brussels, Where It’s Banned

Uber can be fined €10,000 for offering rides to unlicensed taxis in Brussels.

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As taxi protests against Uber Technologies rage across Europe, the ride-sharing mobile app company marches on.

Despite being outlawed in the EU’s capital, where Uber faces a fine of €10,000 ($13,500) if it offers fares to chauffeurs who don’t have a taxi license, the company is advertising for a General Manager in Brussels.

A job advertisement posted on LinkedIn said there were 77 applicants for the post, which Uber describes as “by far the most demanding position Uber has to offer.”

The ad says the successful applicant will “Travel like a diplomat: employees are showered with Uber credits.”

Applications for the position are now closed.

Uber say the company has office space here, but wouldn’t give details.

In Brussels, the seat of the European Union, taxi services are effectively a duopoly, with a complicated relationship regarding taxis travelling to and from the airport, which is in a different federal region.

Uber “is still considered illegal for us,” said Inge Paemen, spokeswoman for Bruxelles-Mobilite, the Brussels federal region administration responsible for infrastructure and traffic.

The service has impounded 13 cars offering Uber services since March—with a 14th evading capture because the driver recognized the credit card number of the inspector. Regular Brussels taxis users will know that taking a credit card is quite remarkable for cabs here.

“Uber is saying it’s not a taxi service, it’s a car-sharing service,” Ms. Paemen told the Wall Street Journal. “But with car-sharing, you say where you’re going and ask who wants to come. Uber just ask people where they want to go.”

She admitted the sector is hard to regulate, and while Bruxelles-Mobilite is clamping down on illegal or irregular taxi drivers, Uber drivers don’t follow special regulations for licensed taxis, or take the special tests relating to negotiating the city’s famously terrible traffic.

It’s up to the justice ministry to decide what happens with the cars seized, and whether they are returned to owners. The Brussels federal prosecutor didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment on what had happened with the 13 unlucky impounded vehicles.

Calls to the federal prosecutor and Taxi Verts on whether fines have been imposed yet weren’t immediately returned.

Meanwhile, one of Brussels’ most high-profile taxi users, European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes, said it was time to call a truce.

“It’s time to sit around a table and come up with reasonable accommodations of innovation,” she wrote in her blog. “We cannot criminalize a whole class of citizens, or drive tourists away from places that need money, in order to protect a few industries that think they can be exempt from the digital revolution.”